ring. Then his gaze fell on the telescope. It was pointing to the streetcar stop, as before. And rubbing his palms, he triumphantly sharpened the focus.
In the lens, two round-shouldered teenagers stood shifting their feet and spitting noiselessly. He moved the tube forward a millimeter and saw next to them a man with a briefcase.
His twin, his double. That very one.
When he ran out onto the street, the kids were trying to snatch the briefcase out of the man’s hands. An empty jar was rolling along the asphalt. A hand flashed, the sound of a dull, crunching blow. The double clutched at his face.
“Hey!” shouted the actor across the street. “What do you think you’re doing!”
And he stepped out into the road.
The impact of a car flipped him around several times in the air. He fell, and tumbling along the asphalt, he came to a stop, his arms flung wide.
Through the dark sludge that was flooding his consciousness, he was able to see his double take off down a side street. Then someone’s hands ran along his body, and he thought about the flutist, how she would undress him, caress him. But these were other hands. Fast and clumsy, a man’s hands. They dug into his pockets and grabbed his watch. Then wiped it off with disgust on the sleeves of his raincoat.
“Look at this weirdo, he’s a copy,” sounded over his ear. “Same face.”
There was some spitting and a swish of fabric. The last things he saw were two pairs of tattered sneakers retreating swiftly down the street.
PART III
DADDY LOVES ME
BY MAXIM MAXIMOV
Her students hated her. For not being young, pretty, or fun. For not being different from who she was. Or they loathed her for something altogether different. Who knows what reasons people find to hate each other …
Although she was, like her colleagues in humanity, made up of 90 percent water, that water was not potable, which in a different circumstance may have, at least partially, influenced the formation of sympathy toward her in her students as well as others around her.
Dad had called her Danae. According to her passport she was Danae. For her students and colleagues she was Dana Innokentievna, a teacher of Russian language and literature.
She had mutual feelings for her students, not because she thought it necessary to answer loathing with loathing, but just because it happened to be so: she was hated and she also hated. A pure coincidence of feelings directed toward one another (if it is allowed that hate is a feeling).
And so, she hated her students—just as in childhood she’d hated lumps in her cereal. In essence, they were indeed lumps in the undigestible cereal of existence. And Danae imagined herself a lump as well—big, flabby, stale. In fact, Danae loathed the directress Gavriushkina like she loathed fish oil or boiled onions. Yet she tried to act nice. And the more she pretended, the more she loathed—her students, her colleagues, the scantily clad woman standing in front of her in line at the supermarket—yes, that very woman with the cart full of ad-emblazoned frozen dinners.
Sometimes Danae thought with bitterness:
Danae Karakleva was forty-seven years old. She knew that there was nothing more to come. It was all over. All the gifts she could have received had already been received. She was simply brought into this remarkable thrift store with the breath of a violated cosmos wafting through it, and they said to her, “Pick something out,” and then they locked her in, in this thrift store where everything had already been picked over. And in this thrift store with the breath of a violated cosmos wafting through it, she had spent forty-seven years.
As regards this existence’s amorous propositions, Danae Karakleva could say the following: “I was never certain that I loved any of those not numerous men who—each in his own time—shook their fatty deposits over my trembling bosom. If Cupid ever shot at my heart, he must have been shooting blanks.”
This thesis which she had invented herself resembled fact, much more so than the rumors about her inevitable old-maid-hood. Among the large-horned herd of her students, it was commonly said in such cases: “Oh yeah? Suck
She liked looking at the shower of pills, especially the round ones, that resembled squashed pearls. She liked to ride the tram past the hospital and look at the sapphire windows of the operating rooms and imagine the surgeon making a fatal error …
Danae and her dad lived in a five-story building, erected under Nikita Khrushchev in the time of the artificial, government-approved destruction of the ark of communal living. There were more than enough such buildings in the neighborhood of Perovo, as there were in many of Moscow’s outlying quarters. They were built out of either panels the color of tubercular spit or gray-pink brick. Each of these residential buildings lacked an elevator. Outward attractiveness and interior comfort—all this was also lacking. It might be easier to list what was present in these buildings: the metastases of all varieties of cancer; staircases by which one might climb to the heights of despair, and if one were to descend it would be into pits of madness; guitar chords of underworld ditties oft performed by greenhorns fated to disappear in the sands of Afghanistan or the ravines of Chechnya. Also present in these buildings were walls that had been viciously fooled by promises of becoming supplementary scrolls for God’s commandments …
Every day, Danae returned to this building, having first stopped at the market or grocery store; she returned with a feeling of a hole, a nagging pain, in the very center of her being …
From the Karaklev family’s kitchen window one could see the subway entrance. In the morning rush hour, before heading out to work in the nearby school, Danae slowly downed a cup of instant coffee while examining the dark human mass. The mass penetrated the underground, shuffling from one leg to another in penguin fashion. The sleepy faces of those people—especially in the dusk of winter mornings—looked ominously similar to one another, lacking features, something like the heads of nails when viewed face on.
Danae’s manner of speaking was as bizarre as her vision. Her speech was understood only by the portraits of the classics that hung on the classroom walls, and not even by all of them. She doubted Maxim Gorky, for one. As regards her pupils—they simply whimpered. Or cursed. Some quietly, others with full voice—depending on how much nerve they had. Danae was kept employed by the school because she seemed rather like an animal that had been listed in the little red book. A wide-faced, warty roe deer, for example.
“As recently as the beginning of the twentieth century, the Perovo neighborhood in the south-east of Moscow consisted of a treasure trove of toxic swamps, the kingdom of poisonous mycelium, and randomly intersecting paths along which it was dangerous to walk alone …” In this manner began the oral dictation, concocted by Danae in order to test the literacy of her pupils, who had come back from their summer vacations with their heads well aired out. It ended thusly: “And now, fuckity-suckity, here you dwell, young sluts and indefatigable jerk-offs …”
Having spoken these words in her mind, Danae stretched her pale lips into an ambiguous smile and began dictating another text—a fake one—that had been approved by the pederasts from the Ministry of Education: “In the spring the forest is awoken by trills, drills, spills, trolls, and various other junk …”
Her daddy, who had schooled her in the art of complex linguistic expression, was dying of cancer … Yes,
